We report on a single-step coating process and the resulting colloidal stability of silica-coated spindle-type hematite nanoparticles (NPs) decorated with a layer of poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) polyelectrolyte chains that are partially incorporated into the silica shell. The stability of PAA coated NPs as a function of pH and salt concentration in water was compared to bare hematite particles and ...

Ionic liquid (IL) surfactant choline dioctylsulfosuccinate, [Cho][AOT], formed polydispersed vesicular structures in the IL, ethylmethylimidazolium ethylsulfate, [C2mim][C2OSO3]. Cytochrome c dissolved in such a colloidal medium has shown very high peroxidase activity (∼2 times to that in neat IL and ∼4 times to that in an aqueous buffer). Significantly, the enzyme retained both structural stab...

Applications for photonic crystals and metamaterials put stringent requirements on the characteristics of advanced optical materials, demanding tunability, high Q factors, applicability in visible range, and large-scale self-assembly. Exploiting the interplay between structural and optical properties, colloidal lattices embedded in liquid crystals (LCs) are promising candidates for such materia...

We describe an experimental test of a new theory of the unidirectional freezing of aqueous colloidal suspensions. At low freezing speeds a planar ice lens completely rejects the particles, forming a steady-state compacted boundary layer in the liquid region. At higher speeds the planar interface becomes thermodynamically unstable and breaks down geometrically to trap bulk regions of colloid wit...

2014 The recently developed density functional theory of freezing is applied to an investigation of the mechanical and thermodynamic stability of polydisperse colloidal crystals. The colloidal particles are modelled by hard spheres with a continuous distribution p(03C3) of additive diameters. It is shown that such solid solutions cease to be stable beyond a critical degree of polydispersity, wh...

– We study the depletion interaction between spherical particles of radius R immersed in a dilute solution of rigid rods of length L. The computed interaction potential is, within numerical accuracy, exact for any value of L/R. In particular we find that for L ∼ R, the depth of the depletion well is smaller than the prediction of the Derjaguin approximation. Our results bring new light into the...

We study the depletion interaction between spherical particles of radius R immersed in a dilute solution of rigid rods of length L. The computed interaction potential is, within numerical accuracy, exact for any value of L/R. In particular we find that for L ∼ R, the depth of the depletion well is smaller than the prediction of the Derjaguin approximation. Our results bring new light into the d...